Paul Nitze

Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was a Wall Street banker who became an important Cold War figure. During the Second World War he founded the School of Advanced International Studies, specifically to train young Americans for service in America's emerging empire. A year after founding SAIS he became vice chairman of the US Strategic Bombing Survey and played an important role in the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1950 Nitze became head of Policy Planning in the State Department and was the principal author of a highly influential secret National Security Council document NSC-68 which pressed for increased arms spending by exaggerating the military threat of the Soviet Union. He was also the most important Washington sponsor of the small group of British intellectuals who founded the Institute for Strategic Studies in the late 1950s.

Nitze continued to exaggerate the Soviet threat throughout his career and later was later actively involved in Team B (headed by Richard Pipes) and the Committee on the Present Danger, both of which exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union to encourage US military spending. The National Security Archive gives the following summary:

In the last few years of Kissinger's tenure in government, Nixon/Ford détente policies experienced strong criticism from Republicans on the right, led by Ronald Reagan, as well as from some liberal democrats and former socialists. Some of these tendencies began to crystallize into what later became known as "neo-conservatism." Reflecting the failure or the inability of the Ford administration to build a national consensus in favor of détente, critics of détente in and out of government began to take on the National Intelligence Estimates, arguing that they consistently underestimated the severity of the Soviet military threat to the United States. Conservatives on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) asked DCI George H.W. Bush to establish a special panel to assess the NIEs and develop an alternative analysis. Headed by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, the Team B panel included Paul Nitze, who played an active part. Other participants were Seymour Weiss and Paul Wolfowitz. Given Team B's ominous assumptions about Soviet intentions and capabilities, Raymond Garthoff later argued, "it [was] not surprising that it came up with more ominous findings." After Ford and Kissinger left office Nitze continued to play a role as a critic by helping to establish the Committee for the Present Danger, which brought together "neo-cons" and Republican conservatives, a number of whom would work for the Reagan administration four years later.

Affiliations

• Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
• NSC-68 Study Group
• Committee on the Present Danger (1976 version)